Hacks

Play backed-up Wii games

If you’re prone to scratching or loosing your Wii games, there’s a way to back up your games to DVD and play them later. An alpha copy of Wii Backup Loader was leaked to the public a while back, and combined with the hack to enable your Wii to run homebrew, this will allow your […]

Hand gesture multitouch using only a webcam

Andy Wilson of MS Research—a name you may recognize from yesterday’s $1 gesture recognition post—is responsible for a number of pretty unbelievable projects involving image processing and human computer interfaces. It’s the sort of stuff that really blurs the boundaries between real and digital environments. I was blown away by the video above, in which […]

Arduino control with Flash AS3

You can communicate from Flash to an Arduino device by using a proxy. The proxy runs on a machine which is connected directly to the Arduino with a serial connection. Your AS3 code talks to the proxy over a TCP socket, and the proxy talks to the Arduino over the serial connection. This whole setup […]

Scraping Wikipedia tables with Google Spreadsheets

Fitting in nicely with the discussion on pulling financial data into Google Spreadsheets, the OUseful blog recently demonstrated another Spreadsheet data import function, importHTML(), which allows you to easily link an external HTML table to your workbook. The Google spreadsheet function =importHTML(“”,”table”,N) will scrape a table from an HMTL web page into a Google spreadsheet. […]

Microsoft Surface without a surface

Microsoft Surface without a surface

Video: Touchless Microsoft has released what’s more or less a stripped-down version of their multitouch Microsoft Surface; in face, there’s no surface included at all. Anyone with a webcam (and Windows) can try it out. From Geek.com: Although many developers may be waiting for the release of the Surface SDK expected later this month, Microsoft […]